What Dan Fogelberg means to me.

At the University of Illinois, sometime in the 60’s Tom and I walk into to The Red Herring coffee house in the basement of the campus Unitarian church. Tom and I are both aging graduate students in English. Secretly, we both know neither of us will complete our dissertations. Dan Fogelberg and another young man with a guitar are performing. A 60’s student lefty style crowd fills the place. Hair, cigarette smoke, patchouli smell. For a short time Tom and I stand behind a railing which I remember as being slightly, but not a full floor, above the performers and most of the crowd. Tom and I may have taken LSD earlier in the evening. I look down on the performers. Fogelberg and the other player are in a pool of light, dark haired, seated and bent over their guitars. The audience is mostly in the dark and until my eyes adjust I can not see what women might be there. I am also looking for authenticity and the performers strike me as very smooth, somehow fraudulent, probably from wealthy homes in Chicago.

I may have dreamed all or some of this recollection because I see it as still photos maybe from the same set, maybe not. I am aware of some confusions in general.

I may have the same kind of advanced prostate cancer that killed Fogelberg yesterday. News of his death came yesterday evening, personal only in the shared cancer. The news followed my misadventures with my big blue truck with a snowplow. I tried to plow three driveways--I do not know anything about snowplowing—slid off the side of my own driveway, frantically dug my way into deeper snow, packed the snow tightly under the chassis, left the four wheels suspended and the front left fender dented but still resting against a smallish dogwood. I cut down the dogwood with a handsaw. My one working chainsaw is next door in the garage, lined up neatly with my brother-in-law Jeff’s saws. I get on my knees and dig out snow from under the truck furiously. Joanne, my wife watches. My number one dog is patiently in the truck. No. I tell my Joanne, I do not need Jeff’s help. Eventually I free the truck. The driveway is a mess, deep ruts, sprays of dirt and gravel are evidence of my urgency. My hands are freezing and I am worried about my hips; both are artificial.

Later, while watching football, after returning from a pool party for children at Shawnee Inn (it is one of my AA friend’s son’s ninth birthday party. My friend is a union laborer in NYC. Other guests include friendly people my friend met on the commuter bus during daily hour and a half to two hour each way, four hundred dollar a month bus rides) I learn of Fogelberg’s death. I scurry off to the computer trying to find out if Fogelberg died from “locally” advanced cancer (mine) or simply a more generally advanced cancer. I google and google and find out that Fogelberg was 56 when he died. He was diagnosed in May 2004. March 2005 for me. He was treated with hormone therapy. Me too. He believed he was in remission. I too think I’m doing pretty well. I wonder: did he have a long course, 43 sessions for me, of radiation? I discover a questionable old news story, later discredited, that centered around Fogelberg’s mother saying the cancer was in his bones and he was getting “experimental” treatment at Harvard. Fogelberg’s mother is very old, one story says, resetting the record to somewhat straight. Mine has not been discovered as being in my bones. (a brief subsidence of restrained terror).

I go outside to prepare my wife’s car for work. I scrape off the snow and ice, fill the reservoir with windshield washer fluid, decide to take the car into the street and turn it around so she will be front out in the morning better able to avoid the new trenches in the snow. While backing into the driveway I become slightly disoriented (caught in a Fogelberg cancer fog bank?) and back directly into my big blue truck ditches. I work the car hard. It is a company car, a new dodge with fine, brand new tires. Forward, reverse, forward reverse I force it ever deeper into the ditch. Thank god the tree is gone but I will miss it and be sad in the spring, (I hope). My brother-in-law Jeff comes over. Jeff is a pressman on his way to the night shift in a printing plant more than an hour away in Hazelton. Jeff is a handy dude, like Joanne and all her siblings and for the moment he is fresh, warm and rested and most importantly,distant from the realms of his own chaoses. He takes over and soon the car is free.

A long night of little sleep follows with thoughts of cancer. Am I being too optimistic? Am I out of touch with reality? Are my doctors hiding or sugar coating the truth? I do not know the answers. I must think of other things. Like the lottery, like the marital problems of a friend, like my son-in-law’s job loss, like my own loss of a client and the disappearance of another, is my incompetence with engine driven vehicles a sign? Was last fall the last season with the Harley? Whistling past the graveyard I try hard not to think of Dan Fogelberg sailing through the summer, as the news stories say, and whistling his own way through the treacherous rocks in the Maine waters..

Global Warming Reality Check

If you are concerned about global warming and catastrophic climate change you should get to know MIT grad Steve Kisch. Visit his web site where you can find this article How it will end which if you have any sense will scare the shit out of you.

Here's a quote from the article:

...The bottom line is this: unless we change our ways, there is more than a 5% chance of a mass human extinction in less than 100 years. I'm just telling you what the overwhelming scientific consensus is. Whether or not you choose to believe it is, of course, up to you. If you do disagree, what is the scientific basis for your disagreement? Do you know something the scientists don't?

So what really killed us? Greed, fear, short sightedness, and an inability to create a government that serves the public interest.

Much as we may hate to admit it, our own government, which we empower to make decisions for us, is essentially no smarter than the frog in Gore's movie. Special interests, driven by short-term greed, control government decisions in America. Politicians, fearing they will be not be re-elected, pay attention to the people who are willing to spend big money to get their way. And despite all the awareness about global warming that has been generated to date, the public is still short sighted and doesn't demand change. That lack of public outrage is why top staffers in the House complain that they can't pass even the simplest of measures to combat climate change, such a bill to increase mileage standards for cars.

It's likely that we not outraged because we will not feel the full impact of the ecological catastrophe we are creating today for another 30 to 50 years due to the thermal inertia of the ocean. The climate changes we are seeing today are just the tip of the iceberg; they are from our emissions from more than 30 years ago. Our emissions today are much higher than 30 years ago. But most people don't know that. They look out the window and things look fine. It seems just too impossible to believe that we could all be dead in less than 100 years. So we choose to ignore what the scientists tell us. The most unequivocal and important scientific consensus in our lifetime and we choose to ignore it. How smart is that?...

Is waterboarding torture?

If Mukasey does not know if waterboarding is torture, there is an easy way for him to find out. He can experience it himself. There are certainly plenty of experts in the CIA or Blackwater who could strap him down and give him the treatment. Then he’d know.

Addiction and secondhand smoke

Here’s something to consider. For many dually addicted it is easier to get off and stay off booze than cigarettes. Could this be because total abstinence from alcohol is possible while it is impossible to avoid second hand smoke? How would ex drunks in recovery fare if they had to swallow a few spoonfuls of booze every day?

Just sayin’, after passing through a few clouds downtown and finding myself wanting a smoke.

Kill your neighbor

Don't be so sure it won't happen here, even soon. Any illusion of our "specialness" as a nation should be long gone and we should know we are not so different from what Bosnia was.

Before the war, you worked in an office. You took care of your parents, who were getting older but still managed to tend their vegetable garden and read the newspaper every day. For your daughter’s ninth birthday, you bought her a bicycle. Your teenage son played soccer for a local team, and when you could, you went to cheer him on.

When the war started, you could not believe that such a thing was possible in this day and age. “It’s the twentieth century,” you told your husband in disbelief. You did not understand how people could kill their neighbors. You blamed their politicians for this sudden contagion of nationalism. People will come to their senses, you reasoned, even as things got worse.

LINK

Via 3Quarks

How to get universal coverage

"Edwards' proposal would cut off health care for the president, Congress and all political appointees in mid 2009, if a universal health care plan for all Americans has not been passed by then." Link

Link to Edwards'plan

Fred Thompson

"...Fred Thompson, who seems to be running for president of Petticoat Junction, emerged from the pickel barrel..."Link, Wolcott

Suggested Topics

Hillary another Bush
Post democracy imperial America
Aristocracy
Over populated
Ignorant, malleable underclass voters
The wad
Uninsured
Under employed
Minimum wages
Mandatory overtime
Improved efficiency

Frederick Winslow Taylor had very precise ideas about how to introduce his system:
"It is only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adaption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured. And the duty of enforcing the adaption of standards and enforcing this cooperation rests with management alone." Link

More Topics

Wage slaves
Compromise
Consensus
Bipartisan
War criminals
Wal-Mart
Halliburton
Blackwater
Katrina
Lead poisoning
Homeland security
Keep your eye on
Searches
Sub prime
Inflation/deflation
Euro up
Iran
Israel’s special status
Ivy League
Untouchables
Lieberman
Elites
Quisling
Pension
Social Security
Medicare
Housing crisis
Illegals

No due date

The last dance?

I got a call this morning from the Democrats looking for $50 to help elect Dems to Congress. I said no. The Democrats make me sick in a way that only your own family can. They offer no real opposition to the Bush agenda, standing by while Republicans destroy the Geneva Convention, the Constitution, legitimize torture, and disable habeas corpus. With not enough courage or commitment to offer meaningful opposition, they flounder around like blind sailors always hoping for a true sense of which way the wind is blowing so they can alter course to match. (think Hillary and others on the war in Iraq, Hillary on flag burning, and more)

In short, maybe the Democratic party is finished.

Here are some paragraphs from Billmon who sees the big political picture very clearly and fits the present into a very neat historical context:

...Maybe the immigrants or the information revolution or economic distress or some other irresistible force will push the wheel around again and leave the Dems on top, or bring a new party to power -- instead of leaving us with a hapless bunch of windbags who have to rely on the mother of all sex scandals to overcome their own handicaps.

But there's a strong smell of fustiness and decay in the system -- almost like the sour, medicinal odor of a nursing home. America isn't a spring chicken any more. At times (like now) you can almost hear the arteries hardening, even if you're not standing next to Dick Cheney. We're getting pretty set in our ways.

The instruments of top-down manipulation and control, and the enormous quantities of cash available to power them, may be too strong for economic change and social evolution (the godparents of political realignment) to overcome. Political change -- much less fundamental change, the kind that frees the slaves or brings malefactors of great wealth to heel -- may no longer be possible in American politics.

The Republicans may lose this election. They're certainly trying hard. They may even lose the next one. But it's going to take more than one or two scandal-boosted victories to persuade me the Dems have a future that doesn't involve being the ornamental decoration on a functionally one-party state.... LINK

If you follow that link and like what you read then go through to Billmon's home page and read the latest few entries.

bin Laden dead?

Headline item on Reuters web site.

...The French regional daily L'Est Republicain reported that, according to a French secret service report, Saudi Arabia was convinced that bin Laden died of typhoid in Pakistan in late August. The French government has said it could not confirm the report and would investigate the intelligence leak....

LINK

CIA interrogators' strike closes secret jails

According to an article, quoted and linked below, on today's Financial Times web page, CIA interrogators refused to run our secret prisons because they were uncertain about their legal status. They were afraid they were going to be prosecuted. Looks like the cofidence in the power of the Bush gang to protect their evil doers is waning. Hopefully more will rediscover the consciences via fear of prosecution.

CIA ‘refused to operate’ secret jails
By Guy Dinmore in Washington

Published: September 20 2006 22:07 | Last updated: September 20 2006 22:07

The Bush administration had to empty its secret prisons and transfer terror suspects to the military-run detention centre at Guantánamo this month in part because CIA interrogators had refused to carry out further interrogations and run the secret facilities, according to former CIA officials and people close to the programme.

The former officials said the CIA interrogators’ refusal was a factor in forcing the Bush administration to act earlier than it might have wished....

...But the former CIA officials said Mr Bush’s hand was forced because interrogators had refused to continue their work until the legal situation was clarified because they were concerned they could be prosecuted for using illegal techniques. One intelligence source also said the CIA had refused to keep the secret prisons going....

LINK

More meltdown news

We may be past the tipping point, with warming accelerating at an unanticipated rate.

Scientists shocked as Arctic polar route emerges

Wed Sep 20, 7:18 AM ET


European scientists voiced shock as they showed pictures which showed Arctic ice cover had disappeared so much last month that a ship could sail unhindered from Europe's most northerly outpost to the North Pole itself.

The satellite images were acquired from August 23 to 25 by instruments aboard Envisat and EOS Aqua, two satellites operated by the European Space Agency (ESA).

Perennial sea ice -- thick ice that is normally present year-round and is not affected by the Arctic summer -- had disappeared over an area bigger than the British Isles, ESA said.
Vast patches of ice-free sea stretched north of Svalbard, an archipelago lying midway between Norway and the North Ple, and extended deep into the Russian Arctic, all the way to the North Pole, the agency said in a press release.

"This situation is unlike anything observed in previous record low-ice seasons," said Mark Drinkwater of ESA's Oceans/Ice Unit.

"It is highly imaginable that a ship could have passed from Spitzbergen or Northern Siberia through what is normally pack ice to reach the North Pole without difficulty."...

LINK

Cheney

The New York Review of Books

via 3 Quarks Daily

He's worse than you thought, worse than you imagined.

torture

I have wanted to post something sensible about the torture debate but I can’t think of a damn thing to say. It seems so obvious that torture is wrong. Always. And that it is nonsensical to think any reasonable, modern government with democratic pretenses could hold otherwise. When I reflect on the torture discussion, I find myself astonished that we have gotten here without mass revulsion. Forty or fifty years go would anyone have believed that as a country we would have so quickly degenerated to open embrace of absolute evil?

Pack up all your cares and woes....

If you are a connoisseur of really deep and dark pessimistic views and take secret pleasure in imminent doom, then take a look at this post by billmon which brings us face to face with a possibly super heated earth in ten or twenty years. He offers a vision so chilling it will melt away your everyday cares and woes and transport you to the comfort of collapse so all encompassing there is little to do but surrender or elbow your way along with the throngs heading north.

Collapsing Empire

Billmon takes our inventory.

...You can learn a lot about a country in five years.

What I've learned (from 9/11, the corporate scandals, the fiasco in Iraq, Katrina, the Cheney Administration's insane economic and environmental policies and the relentless dumbing down of the corporate media -- plus the repeated electoral triumphs of the Rovian brand of "reality management") is that the United States is moving down the curve of imperial decay at an amazingly rapid clip. If anything, the speed of our descent appears to be accelerating.

The physical symptoms -- a lost war, a derelict city, a Potemkin memorial hastily erected in a vacant lot -- aren't nearly as alarming as the moral and intellectual paralysis that seems to have taken hold of the system. The old feedback mechanisms are broken or in deep disrepair, leaving America with an opposition party that doesn't know how (or what) to oppose, a military run by uniformed yes men, intelligence czars who couldn't find their way through a garden gate with a GPS locator, TV networks that don't even pretend to cover the news unless there's a missing white woman or a suspected child rapist involved, and talk radio hosts who think nuking Mecca is the solution to all our problems in the Middle East. We've got think tanks that can't think, security agencies that can't secure and accounting firms that can't count (except when their clients ask them to make 2+2=5). Our churches are either annexes to shopping malls, halfway homes for pederasts, or GOP precinct headquarters in disguise. Our economy is based on asset bubbles, defense contracts and an open-ended line of credit from the People's Bank of China, and we still can't push the poverty rate down or the median wage up....

Read the entire post here: LINK

Mercenaries are the scourge of poor areas of the World

Though the U.S. has lost its moral compass it does not mean that others have done so.

The quote below comes from the NY Times

August 29, 2006
South Africa Assembly OKs Mercenary Bill
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:48 p.m. ET

CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP) -- South Africa moved closer Tuesday to a sweeping anti-mercenary law that critics said would also undermine legitimate security work in countries like Iraq and threaten humanitarian activities.

''Mercenaries are the scourge of poor areas of the world, especially Africa,'' Defense Minister Mosiuoa Lekota told a parliamentary session before the new law was approved. ''Anybody that has money can hire these human beings and turn them into killing machines or cannon fodder.''

By a 211-28 vote, the National Assembly approved the Prohibition of Mercenary Activity and Regulation of Certain Activities in Areas of Armed Conflict Bill, thanks to the large majority of the ruling National African Congress.

The legislation now must go to the second parliamentary chamber, the National Council of Provinces, but that is expected to be a formality because of the ANC majority.

Opposition lawmakers and independent analysts said the legislation would have a direct impact on thousands of South African security workers abroad.

There are an estimated 2,000 to 4,000 South Africans in Iraq alone, helping guard oil installations, hotels and foreign residents. Thousands more are in other countries such as Nigeria and Afghanistan. Many of them are white veterans of the apartheid-era armed forces.

All South Africans wanting to work in security and military sectors abroad will now have to register with an arms control committee. Len Le Roux, an analyst with the Institute for Security Studies, said this would likely lead to long bureaucratic delays and dissuade foreign companies from hiring South Africans....

Link

from the Whiskey Bar

This about covers it.

What the health of the Republic requires . . . may not be a new crop of leakers and whistleblowers, or a fresh young generation of Woodwards and Bernsteins -- or even a more independent, aggressive media. What it may need is a new population (or half of a population, anyway), one that hasn't been stupified or brainwashed into blind submission, that won't look upon sadistic corruption and call it patriotism, and that will refuse to trade the Bill of Rights for a plastic Jesus and a wholly false sense of security.
Whiskey Bar
Sore Throat
June 3, 2005

LINK

Sun King

There’s a long list of “froms” behind the quote below. I found it first on firedoglake, followed her link to The Washington Post’s Dan Froomkin who is quoting from a quote in a New Yorker profile by Jane Mayer, not available on line.

"Bruce Fein, a Republican legal activist, who voted for Bush in both Presidential elections, and who served as associate deputy attorney general in the Reagan Justice Department, said that Addington and other Presidential legal advisers had 'staked out powers that are a universe beyond any other Administration. This President has made claims that are really quite alarming. He's said that there are no restraints on his ability, as he sees it, to collect intelligence, to open mail, to commit torture, and to use electronic surveillance. If you used the President's reasoning, you could shut down Congress for leaking too much. His war powers allow him to declare anyone an illegal combatant. All the world's a battlefield -- according to this view, he could kill someone in Lafayette Park if he wants! It's got the sense of Louis XIV: 'I am the State.' "

Most of us know that the Bush administration considers itself above the laws and the rest of us to be dumbass tools sent off to shoot up the world, sweep up, and be perhaps useful as organ donators, but what's interesting is this characterization comes from a Reagan Republican.

Update: asshole (a feel good link)

Micro, microecon

On my street, three of the 24 houses are for sale, two of those for more than a year. Out on the main road there are two new homes, built on spec I think, that are also unsold. There has been a sustained house building boom here in northeast Pennsylvania that may now have over built itself out business. Part of this slowdown may be due to local causes.

As more working people move here to escape the high cost of housing in New York and New Jersey, schools are being built and property taxes are going up. Soon they will be high enough to make housing in New Jersey competitive again. Also, under the best of traffic and weather conditions it takes 1 ½ to 1 ¾ hours to drive to New York. Commuting uses a lot of gas and as gas prices rise, along with interest rates, tight budgets become tighter and sometimes snap. Too many people that are driven by dreams of a country home, backyard and good schools make delusional calculations on what they can afford. There are a lot of foreclosed homes competing with a growing number of new houses for a dwindling number of buyers. I’m guessing that for many the financial benefit of living in the Poconos no longer out weighs the agony of spending four to six hours a day getting to work. I’m also betting that the swindling builders are no longer able close deals with wised up potential buyers, with an unfounded promise of a new commuter railroad to built any minute now.

In addition to keeping track of the homes on my street up for sale, I also study the golf courses. I used to golf and some friends still do. There are many public golf courses here and a few years ago they were crowded. There were usually more cars in the lots with New York and New Jersey plates than there those licensed in Pennsylvania. It was difficult to get tee times and when you did you crept along the course taking five and more hours to complete 18 holes. It was almost as frustrating as commuting. You paid a hundred bucks to get pissed off.

Now, no one is golfing; it seems. My friends that golf say the courses are nearly empty. You can play a round quickly and then go around again and again until dark. I confirm their observations every day on the way to the post office. The golf course at the bottom of the hill is always nearly empty or at best there are five or ten cars in the lot, a few more on weekends, very different from the spill over mobs a few years ago.

As with the collapse of the housing market I have guesses about empty golf courses too. Would be golfers are working long weekday hours and also weekend hours, because they are scared shitless they will lose their jobs and fail to keep up with a rising flood of debt. Those demands on workers, white and blue collared, coupled with family duties, leave no time for golf. An afternoon of golf today turns into hours of agonizing over vulnerabilities coming from things left undone.

At last check, the market was down better than a hundred points today, the drop mainly fueled by the diminished housing market.